Obama speech breaks Twitter records

On Thursday night, as President Barack Obama walked out onto the stage in Charlotte, N.C., his campaign was capping off perhaps its busiest social media week ever. In just four days, the Obama campaign posted more than 40 videos on YouTube, tweeted more than 250 times and reached out to thousands of fans on Facebook.

The Democratic National Convention showed that Obama’s campaign is still on the leading edge of the social media politics.

According to Twitter’s Government and Politics team, the president set a new record on Twitter for mentions Thursday night. During his speech, there was an average of 52,757 tweets a minute, and over the course of the entire four-day convention there were 9 million mentions. During the speech, Obama’s campaign tweeted quotes from the president’s address, and many of those updates were retweeted hundreds and thousands of times. One of the most popular quotes (“The election four years ago wasn’t about me. It was about you. My fellow citizens—you were the change.”) was reposted more than 5,000 times in less than an hour.

The campaign was quick to post many of the tribute videos from the DNC on YouTube, including the 7-minute clip that introduced the President.

The campaign also produced two videos just to get people to watch Thursday night’s big speech, one of which featured John Cho and Kal Penn of Harold and Kumar fame. The video was featured prominently on YouTube’s homepage in a pop-down ad for the speech that was clearly a huge media buy for the campaign.

The video was first posted on Sept. 3, and by the end of the week, it had been viewed more than 700,000 times. It showed that the campaign understands the value of humor online.

“I can see it now.... Harold﻿ and Kumar Go to the Democratic National Convention,” wrote Baka20, in one of the most popular comments on the video.

Obama was also active on Facebook during the speech, posting an image of the president with one of the highlighted quotes from the address. In less than an hour, it had gained 4,000 comments, 9,000 shares, and nearly 100,000 likes.

But even if the week was about the Democrats and Obama, Mitt Romney was still part of the conversation on Facebook. While this week, more than 3.1 million people were talking about Obama, during the same period, 3.3 million users were talking up Romney. The dead heat on Facebook reflects the dead heat in the polls, according to Real Clear Politics. The next 60 days until the election are sure to be interesting.